ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

NOTICE: This is all a big IF right now, as I'm not staff and there are other priorities right now for them, but this is most likely happening at some point anyway.

Context

This site's official content is (and has been, for a long time) lacking top difficulty content. Death Piano and RATO have always been some sort of "remaining challenge" although because of their spikes and overall structure, they've never quite been files people like to put a lot of time into. Lately we've got Undici and Dreamin' Attraction, for a whopping 1 file breaking the ceiling in 8 years.

Yesterday RATO was AAA'd. That leaves the new best player with a single file with a higher difficulty. This is not how we keep the best players interested in pushing the limits even more. Now one could say "Well why should we care about top tier players, they're like 0.01% of the player base". Well check this out: Why not ? Here's the thing, news like RATO AAA are some the most captivating news because it's an achievement that goes beyond what most would expect to be possible. By building a wider repertoire of files that are such an insane challenge, we give an incentive for the best players to achieve other feats like that.

Lets say I'm 100% wrong here. What could happen ? Nothing except we have more super hard files ingame.

Idea

Obviously, there is the batch system. However that gives no incentive to the stepartists and many have become tired of waiting forever for their content to be released. This problem is not really someone's fault: there is a lack of judges and motivation overall.

The suggestion here is something that's been done already. A stepwars contest where stepartists have a deadline to chart 1 or 2 files (of their choice, as long as we have permission) and the best files are kept and put ingame. The requirements would probably be a bit different (plus I'm not staff so I probably wouldn't be allowed to host this but I assure you, it Will happen).

Here's what we need:

• Judges: Any player who wants to judge very hard files (Difficulty 102+) raise your hand.
• Stepartists: Any stepartist who wants to chart files in the range 102-115, raise your hand.

The best I can do right now is gathering people who are willing to create content. The next steps would of course be in the hands of staff members.


As an incentive, I'm willing to offer 100$ as a donation to the event to divide between the winners & judges, however the splits are done.


STEPARTISTS:
DarkZtar
Pizza69
Wayward Vagabond
Patashu
samurai7694
Aquellex


JUDGES:
gold stinger
DossarLX ODI (?)

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I want to point out that the judges would need to be willing to provide actual thorough notes since I believe in rewarding judges too, not only stepartists. Otherwise, we'd miss 50% of the necessary people.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Give me the opportunity and tools to run & lead a 100+ batch right now, and I will gladly open one up within the next 24 hours.

I've had a hand in both of the current active batches, and the first pass on judgments have already been completed for both of them. They are both waiting for fixes to be sent in & approved, which for the most part, is slower than the deadline (in the community aspect of 'tired of waiting for release' side of things) of just getting the initial judgments & notes out on them.

Been pondering of a much higher difficulty range than 115, closer to 130. Imo there is not enough merit for Death Piano & Undici for their difficulty, as well as the difficulty can easily go up to a point where FC becomes a problem for D8 players.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Judges for something like this couldn't be just anyone. There's a lot to think about when it comes to super hard files for FFR. What you see on SM or whatever program you're stepping on isn't always going to translate well when converted. It takes someone with that knowledge for this.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

And you are very right. Which is why this thread is all about seeing the general level of interest. Judges would definitely Not be picked randomly, but anyone can raise their hand and say they'd like to. The goal here is to get a pool of people, and then see what can be done with that.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I think we need to establish what D8 or whatnot would be in terms of accuracy, because ye speed and acc are different limits



as an example, light 300 bpm smooth jumpstream is accable

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Remember that FFR uses AAA equivalency for difficulty rating. No matter how good/bad that metric is, that's what we have for now. Nothing stops us to rework that later if it's deemed too bad, but for now that shouldn't affect the problem/idea at hand here.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Well, what I mean by that is that files are designed to be AAA'd on FFR and thats the basis for their difficulty, which is different compared to etterna/stepmania d8, so its the root of the problem at hand, because its important to define what d8 actually is in terms of patterns, bpm, nps etc, imo

just using rato as an example, if FFR was based around going for AA rather than AAA, then im sure it would be rated much lower than 100+, winter wind etude as another example would probably be lower, etc

my point is that its hard to chart files in that range when you don't know the difficulty that file should be

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Designed to be AAA'd is false. Rated on their potential AAA difficulty is right. The difference is important. Like I said, the difficulty metric is another topic (an important one though). It is definitely harder to aim for a specific difficulty in that high range, but we do have ingame files which can provide a good comparison basis. Things Will need to be discussed and doublechecked, but that's not the point of this thread/step. Here we need to know if people want to participate or not.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

The part I bolded here is important. We'd have to make sure the files aren't hard for the sake of being hard. Undici, for example, was a collaboration that went through several revisions and even then I had to go in and do some frame fixes after its conversion.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Step this one for D8

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I'd be willing to submit more hard files to the batch in an attempt to help get more high-end difficulty files into the game. Though I already have tried sending in stuff in the 105+ range and my track record with those submissions has been... pretty terrible.
I feel like the sort of unwritten status quo was to have Undici always be the hardest file available in the game, but with the RATO AAA being achieved, the perceived skill ceiling palatable within the game may have changed.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Due to the nature of ffr i'm willing to bet every 101+ file to be as intended will need frame fixes

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Idk if a batch will open or if this contest idea will become a thing, but no matter what we do need files of that difficulty. I'm hoping we can have at least 2 judges check each file to reduce bias (which at this difficulty is very real) but that might be a bit of a dream.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

By releasing many files you can lower the quality threshold by a bit since the average can still be sufficiently high. When you release a single file, you have no choice but to make it a very high quality file. I'm not saying we should let trash ingame, but being too perfectionist does it no good either. As long as the files stay in the general FFR vibe where ghost notes should be avoided mostly, there should be plenty of space for files within that high difficulty range.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I'm totally down to chart some crazy stuff for this. I've already got one suitable file sitting around, and it would be exciting to see new hard stuff in FFR.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

chart toes pls

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I have a half finished file that could be used for this.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

when is wv presents [W] gonna come out

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

First I gotta make wv presents [O] and [O²] so I can release wv presents [OwO]

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

wv presents o2jam owo

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I can submit stuff for this.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

chart joker for d8

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

FFR NEEDS JOKER

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

people here saying they have 100+ stuff already stepped if that's the case then send it my way for a possible D8 lol

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

id argue theres at least 5000 potential stepmania files that would be d8 if submitted but my number might be off it might be more like 10000

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I see the motivation for stepping files seems high enough. What would be great is judges. The selection of those is definitely more tricky but I think that if we use a panel of judges who crosscheck files to some extent, that would be ideal. Since rewards would be involved, the judging should be the least biased possible.

Also to reward judges, I'd say something like a vote from the community and judges, where the judges must vote for 1 judge other than themselves and the members of the community vote for 2 judges each, we'd have a nice system. The voting would be done towards the judge who did the best job at thoroughly reviewing the files and crosschecking other judges.

This wouldn't hurt. A stepcon will probably happen even if some hard files are released during tourney because we need many of them.

For a stepcon there's probably no way you can submit a file that's not yours. I've been thinking about a way to regulate the submission of already stepped files from the actual stepartist, but I wont share those yet since that's for another step.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I already sent one but I guess I can finish the other more interesting and less bs wip I have.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

i always wondered why there werent "unofficial" batches... even if its for play, it feels like u cld start one up and then submit it to the "officials" where they cld go "ok, seems good/somewhat like what we wldve done"

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

There are regular batches for songs to just be released into the regular rotation frequently. they used to be seasonal. And then the Tournament Special batch is just for the tournament and has a number of additional constraints.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

oh sure, i just meant like non official people "making batches" and then "judging simfiles in the batches" for fun, rather than it being centralised by any particular person... in this case thered just be a single point where ud need a central authority, mb like one person (dossar?) to judge whether the judging was sufficiently rigorous

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I was already trying to get a stepcon/wars thing going, but it went basically unnoticed aside from cornman.
http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/...d.php?t=151113



We implimented the whole public judgement system and people basically ignored it. That shit took me forever to finish too.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Finding Stepmania files with the right combination of:

1. We have permission for it on FFR
2. The stepartist wants it on FFR
3. It's suitable for a 30fps frame-based judgment system
4. It's still actually 100+ difficulty on FFR
and
5. It's not a dumpfile

is surprisingly difficult.
For example in my library of 1000s of finished files, basically every single 100+ difficulty file that could be on FFR, is. And I intentionally step in a pretty FFR-friendly way for SM.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

^ truth

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I honestly never saw that, but my goal is not to take your spot, I'm just glad it's now being noticed.


@hi19, would you be interested too ? I'm keeping a list in the OP for Dossar and staff

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

ah... : ( that is a shame...

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

sending mondo brutale

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

sending sinthasomphone tomorrow

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I think it's important to know if people are more interested in just a simple very hard batch or a stepcon like I described ?

Like I said earlier, I believe in rewarding good judges And good stepartists, which I'm not sure happens in a simple batch. However if people are satisfied with a batch, there's no need for an elaborate contest.

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

yo I can send in stuff for this, working w/ Patashu on something rn

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

Sick. That's now 6 awesome names in the list

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?
 

I'll try to send something

Re: ATTN Stepartists & Lvl 100+ players: high difficulty contest ?